Pyinmana is booming—but at what cost?... "Once a rural backwater, Pyinmana is now a boom town, as Burma?s rulers shift their power center from Rangoon, some 320 km to the south. Visitors returning to Pyinmana after an absence of only a few years would scarcely recognize the city that has risen from a provincial town of 100,000 inhabitants, who once owed their livelihoods to logging and a sugarcane refinery. Now new businesses—particularly construction companies and real estate firms—are shooting up like forest mushrooms in the rainy season..."